HOSPITAL STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21978, 30 December 1936, Page 10

HOSPITAL STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

DAMAGE ESTIMATED AT £IO.OOO ROOFS, WALLS, AND CHIMNEYS WRECKED (FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) SYDNEY, December 24. Lightning three times struck the hospital at Cessnock. about 20 miles north of Newcastle, late on Monday afternoon, endangering the lives of 103 patients and members of the staff and doing damage officially estimated at £IO,OOO. The storm was general in the Cessnock district and afterwards travelled south to Sydney, but its main force was concentrated along a strip or country about a mile long and 15U vards wide. Many houses in this strip, as well as the hospital, were affected. At the hospital, roofs, walls, and chimneys were shattered. Nurses off duty rushed out of the debris of their quarters, where the chimney had been driven through the tiled roof, and, still covered with soot and plaster, lent a hand to the terrified patients. Not one section of roofing of the hospital block, the matron s or the nurses' quarters remained intact. Shelters recently erected in the grounds were lifted and strewn in all directions. A miner with a broken collarbone scrambled from the bed an instant before it was smothered by broken glass and other flying ruin. The automatic cutting off of the electric current averted the possibility of death by electric shock. Nurses and other hospital officers worked in the wards by candle-light. Patrick Slavin, an ambulance officer, was in the laundry with three laundry maids when the roof of the building was lifted and one wall fell in. Tons of bricks were hurled over the boiler and machinery. The girls escaped unharmed, but Slavin was struck by a brick. As Slavin was escaping, his home, directly opposite the hospital, was struck, and, with its contents, almost destroyed. "Saw the Roof Moving" "I was in the kitchen with my three children," Mrs Slavin said, "when I saw the roof moving. Clutching the children, I dragged them out of the house just as the roof collapsed." A length of heavy timber from the hospital roofing struck the roof of a verandah 50 yards away, burying a 10-year-old boy, Laurence Adler, who was taken to the hospital and treated for cuts to the head, legs, and foot. In houses near the hospital roofs were torn off, verandahs smashed down, and fronts blown in. Electric light, telephone, and telegraph wires were thrown down all over the district. A five-year-old girl, Te-Hilla Lammi. was killed by lightning at Kulnura, south of Newcastle, during the same storm. She and her brother, aged seven, were with their father, August Lammi, a Finn, on the verandah of their orchard home, when the verandah was struck. They were all thrown violently to the ground. When Lammi recovered, he found that the girl's clothing was smouldering, and he plunged her into a tub of water. Police, ambulance, and a doctor were rushed from Gosford, but the child was dead when they arrived.